Posts by Monica Cellio
Since you're a software developer, I encourage you to think about the book the way you think about a significant application. You (probably) don't just start writing code; you do some requirements...
Consequences. That something is possible within a system doesn't mean it's a good idea. You can drive your car 180MPH on public roads (if the speedometer labeling is accurate), but if you do you'...
Text in all capitals is harder to read than text in mixed case: A 1955 study by Miles Tinker showed that “all-capital text retarded speed of reading from 9.5 to 19.0 per cent for the 5 and 10-m...
A comic -- web or paper, cartoon strip or sophisticated graphic novel -- is a different medium from conventional written stories. The biggest difference is that it's hard to do exposition; those l...
Not long ago I read a novel set in the near future (mid-21st century). My suspension of disbelief was totally fine with time travel, an implanted "universal translator" of sorts, major medical adv...
I agree with SF and Lauren that who your POV character is affects this. But I'll take a different approach in answering this: when you talk about your project socially (e.g. with friends/family), ...
With help from a coworker I was able to fix this by adding the following to the FO stylesheet: <xsl:template match="classname"> <fo:inline hyphenate="false"> <xsl:call-templat...
In technical documentation, sometimes the tool's automatic hyphenation makes a bad break in the middle of a term, like the name of an environment variable or function. In these cases I would rathe...
In my experience there are two main types of blogs out there, topic-focused and person-focused. You're describing the latter. Person-focused blogs, which cover a range of topics and styles with t...
If your antagonist is living in the present time (but is 1000 years old), then is there any reason to believe that his speech hasn't evolved? Think about what happens to people when they move to a...
"Hard and fast rules" come from the style guide you're following; all else is convention. I've seen both styles in fiction, so to decide which to use you can look at examples of similar type (genr...
I saw an effective example of this in 1634: The Baltic War (David Weber & Eric Flint) recently. The factors that made it work were: The background speech was in italics (as you've done here)...
In many cases you don't actually need, or necessarily want, to describe the gesture itself. It is often enough, or even preferable, to (a) convey that there was a gesture and (b) convey its meanin...
The reference documentation for an application programming interface (API) is, in modern systems, usually generated from the code itself automatically. For example, for Java interfaces a typical t...
Buying guides, including reviews and prices, are not uncommon, with the quintessential example (at least in the US) being Consumer Reports, a monthly product-review magazine (with web site). Local...
I don't think the information is entirely unnecessary, but it's dry. Lauren gave a good answer about adding more feeling; in this answer I'll focus on another style issue. You have a lot of "she ...
If a reader follows a reasonable path1 through your documentation, there should never be a point where he's looking at something incomprehensible. This applies to text, code samples, diagrams...and...
It's tempting to include all this information that you already know, so what's the harm? The harm, as you indicate in your question, is that the outline no longer serves as a good gauge of your pr...
As Lauren said, the outline is a tool for your use, not a deliverable in its own right, so if you deviate from it, that's ok. You asked how to track these dependencies in an outline. A techniqu...
It depends on the context. In the example in this question, cars are being presented as connected to buses somehow, so it makes sense to have this kind of segue. However, in a chapter with a bunc...
Why does apparent technology have to actually be technology? Can't it be either mundane or magical instead, even if in our world we would call it science or tech? Strength and speed can be enhanc...
Instead of a looking for a single expression, consider the cases individually. If you can show us that it's black (pitch- or otherwise), you won't need to tell us. Consider: Pine resin cloake...
My background: wanted to be a programmer, entered a math program in college (because that was how you got to CS), loved the CS but hated the math, switched to technical writing and took the CS from...
Do you read? Study anything? Noodle around with puzzles or technical problems (in any field)? If so, try reacting to that. Write about something you've just learned and what further thoughts an...
For a screenplay, it is probably more important to be clear than to have excellent, flowing prose. (I'm not a screenwriter.) For the more-general case of descriptive prose, however, one approach ...
